ACS:Law Anti-Piracy Law Firm Torn Apart By Leaked Emails

Written by enigmax on September 25, 2010 Earlier this week, anti-piracy lawyers ACS:Law had their website taken down by a 4chan DDoS attack. Adding insult to injury, owner Andrew Crossley was harassed at home in the middle of the night by prank phone calls. Now, through a fault with his website, hundreds of megabytes of private emails have been exposed to the public and uploaded to The Pirate Bay. To those hoping that this is a MediaDefender-type fiasco all over again, trust us – it is.

After coordinating DDoS attacks against the MPAA, RIAA and anti-piracy company AiPlex Software this week, 4chan turned to a new target.
Anti-piracy lawyers ACS:Law, who send out tens of thousands of letters demanding cash-settlements from often innocent Internet subscribers, became the new target. The company, which is headed up by lone principal Andrew Crossley, is widely hated among file-sharers and innocents alike and with 4chan’s Operation Payback now in full swing, payback is the operative word.
After prank telephone calling Crossley in the middle of the night during the week, it now seems that 4chan are aiming to tear his professional life apart, as they have obtained and are distributing a 350mb file of the company’s website which includes countless company emails.
So how were they obtained?
“Their site came back online [after the DDoS attack] – and on their frontpage was accidentally a backup file of the whole website (default directory listing, their site was empty), including emails and passwords,” a leader of the attacking group told TorrentFreak. “The email contains billing passwords and some information that ACS:Law is having financial problems.”
Financial problems? Interesting. Many tens of thousands of people who received letters from ACS:Law are also experiencing the same problem, having already paid up several hundred pounds each to make non-existent lawsuits go away.
“We’re still sorting through it. There’s a lot of stuff here to go through. But, basically, we were told we were less important than a 10 minute late train, or a queue for coffee by Andrew,” the attackers’ spokesman told us, adding:
“Payback is a bitch, isn’t it Andrew?”
The file is currently seeding on The Pirate Bay but most leechers are stuck with less than 60%. It is, however, available publicly on the web already. We have managed to secure one of those copies and are examining it now.
A little taster from emails read so far:
– ACS:Law and USCG (of Hurt Locker fame) appear to be cooperating
– Crossley boasts that his retained lawyer “literally wrote the SRA rules!”
– Crossley accuses Which? of ‘defamation’ and articles designed to “demean” and “denigrate”
– Crossley gives veiled warnings to Which? that he could sue them for libel
– Internal documents reveal intentions to take down Slyck.com
– Email from ACS:Law client which states the following:- Crossley brags about his financial status:(later emails reveal he bought a Jeep Compass 2.4CVT)
– Email evidence that ACS:Law deliberately does not target two UK ISPs, TalkTalk and Virgin Media
– Crossley writes to monitoring company NG3Sys and says the following:After falling out with NG3Sys, ACS:Law sent this out to other potential monitoring company:- Series of highly abusive emails from Crossley to his ex-wife, where in part he tells her to “**** off and keep out of my life” and accuses her of being with a “drug addled hermit”.
- Crossley tells his assistant Terence Tsang to “be more discreet with this stuff” when referring to our article where we revealed ACS:Law looked to buy anti-piracy tracking software on the cheap.
Of course, as with our coverage of the MediaDefender leaked emails back in 2007, TorrentFreak’s coverage of this debacle will be extensive.

Andrew Crossley, the head of ACS:Law, told The Register the attack was "typical rubbish from pirates".

"Big whoop," he added.

"It was only down for a few hours. I have far more concern over the fact of my train turning up 10 minutes late or having to queue for a coffee than them wasting my time with this sort of rubbish."

Email evidence that ACS:Law deliberately does not target two UK ISPs, TalkTalk and Virgin Media

The film was called Chubby Chasers

As reported widely in the media today, a list with names and addresses of some 8,000+ UK broadband users has been posted on the internet, along with details of adult films they are accused of sharing. The list belonged to ACS:Law, a law firm which writes letters to other ISPs’ customers that are accused by rightsholders of filesharing, demanding compensation payments.
I say ‘other’ because TalkTalk has never given any customer details to ACS:Law or any other law firm working on this basis, so our customers will not be affected by this breach.
It’s a stark reminder of the dangers of giving out customer details to third parties in trying to combat filesharing. While we do not condone illegal filesharing, we have consistently argued for better ways of combating copyright theft. Handing over customer details to law firms to seek ‘compensation’, based on accusations from rightsholders, is not the answer.
Tracking down illegal filesharers is complex and the current approach isn’t working. The first problem is around detection: if you can only see what’s being downloaded at each connection, how do you know which of the several users has actually infringed copyright?
Secondly, we’ve demonstrated before how it’s possible for connections to be hacked by serial filesharers. Again, this can result in false accusations being made against subscribers and is the key reason why we’ve refused to hand over our customers’ details to ACS:Law or any other law firm working in this way.
We have applied for a Judicial Review to re-evaluate the online infringement of copyright provisions of the Digital Economy Act which will use the same flawed detection methods and received insufficient Parliamentary scrutiny. You can get involved through the DEA Facebook page and Open Rights Group’s petition.

a. The claim was not defended so there was no challenge to the submissions by Davenport Lyons

b. The court accepted the Davenport Lyons quantum calculation without challenge

c. The model submitted by Davenport Lyons was based upon, in my opinion, an extremely poor understanding of the underlying technology of P2P interaction

d. The Davenport Lyons model, in my opinion, failed to apply accepted and fundamental mathematical principals in its calculation, including queuing theory, and would have difficulty in passing an applied mathematics assessment if submitted in an “A level” statistics paper.

e. There are a number of factors in any model for calculation of the quantum of damage resulting from a making available via P2P which it is impossible for the monitoring software to establish and the model relies upon unsubstantiated, and in some cases erroneous logic, assumptions.

f. There are a number of factors in any model for calculation of the quantum of damage resulting from a making available via P2P which, for technical and commercial reasons, that the monitoring software fails to record and the model relies upon unsubstantiated, and in some cases erroneous logic, assumptions.

g. There are a number of factors in any model for calculation of the quantum of damage resulting from a making available via P2P which, for commercial reasons, means that legal disclosure has not been requested that could substantiate the multipliers and the model relies upon unsubstantiated assumptions based upon seriously flawed logic, to complete other assumptions necessary for predictive analytics and the quantum is predicated on the results of all these assumptions.

h. The Davenport Lyons model was developed by a person with no academic qualifications or experience, of a technical or mathematical nature, that would be accepted by the courts as being of a standard sufficient to be classified as “Expert”.